


What Friends Are Living

by Gileonnen



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, Gen, Letters from the Front Lines, Spiritualism, The Obligation of the Living to the Dead, seances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-24 20:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: On a cold night in November, 1921, Kate Percy and her family go to Glendower to see what the dead have to say.





	What Friends Are Living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newredshoes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newredshoes/gifts).



When the mantel clock chimed the quarter hour, Kate was taking a sip of her brandy and considering the most discreet way to scratch the itch where her stockings met the crease of her knee. Catrin was tuning the guitar across her lap, matching the strings' song to her own. Harry and Archie Douglas were deep in an impenetrable conversation on the finer points of a rugby tackle. Old Mr Glendower was halfway into his smoking jacket as Mr Percy waited at the door, still droning on about King Henry's fiscal policy and his shameful treatment of veterans.

Then the clock rang. One soft peal, and the song died on Catrin's lips. Kate put down her brandy, and her glass rang out on the side table to echo the clock. Mr Glendower paused with one arm still free, then shrugged off the smoking jacket again. Still Harry went on--"If they can bait you into a maul you're as good as done for--" until even he seemed to feel the silence bearing down.

"Ah," he said after a moment. Kate saw him lick his lips. They were cracked, nearly bloody from the dry November cold. "Hadn't realized it had got so late. Well, hop to it, Archie. The fortune-teller's promised us a show."

Kate glanced at Catrin, who set her guitar aside. Her face was white, her fingers visibly trembling. "Do you need to fetch your letters?" Kate asked. "Mine are in my purse."

"No, no, they're here," said Catrin softly. "Just a moment." She stood from her wingback chair and went to a bookshelf with iron-latticed doors, from which she withdrew a bundle of letters. Rain and three years of rereading had worn the paper down, but even from across the room, Kate recognized her brother's handwriting on the envelopes.

Kate took Catrin's white hand. The shaking in her fingers eased, and she gripped Kate's hand with surprising strength. There were calluses on each of her fingers where they struck the guitar strings; Catrin had never cared to use a pick. When she met Kate's gaze, her eyes were the gold-edged green of a sunlit forest glade. "All right. I'm ready," she said.

The six of them trooped up the narrow stairs to Mr Glendower's study, which lay nestled beneath the high, peaked roof of the house. Outside, rain lashed the hard slate roof and pattered against the window glass. Catrin threw open the windows, and at once, a cold wind snaked in. It stirred the loose papers on Mr Glendower's desk and made Kate's hair whip about her face.

"Fine lot of good it will do if we all catch a chill and die of an ague," groused Mr Percy. "I'm not inclined to join the dead as well as converse with them--"

"No one says 'ague' anymore," Kate said firmly. Because he was her father-in-law, she didn't actually tell him to shove his grim, needling prognostications up his arse, but for a moment she savored the taste of the temptation.

"The spirits are restless," Mr Glendower intoned, with a warning note in his voice that Kate thought meant he was thoroughly sick of keeping up a conversation with Mr Percy. He lit three long tapers and set them in the center of the table. "Take your seats. Catrin, will you prepare the deck?"

"Of course." Catrin brought out a little cedar box and withdrew a pack of cards wrapped in silk. She closed her eyes and began to shuffle the cards, separating the deck into two with nimble fingers and letting them cascade together until they became one again. Every now and then, she took the top card and reversed it before shuffling it back into the deck. _In case Edmund hasn't finished telling of the war,_ Kate thought. She sank into a seat at the table and laid her brother's letters on the polished wood before her.

The rest of them took seats at the round table, so close on all sides that her knee knocked Harry's and her elbow bumped Mr Glendower's. Tightly-packed though they were, though, they left one seat empty for the dead.

Confronted with that empty chair, everyone grew quiet. For a moment, there was only the sound of rain and wind, the _flick flick flick_ of Catrin's cards, the steady tick of Mr Percy's pocketwatch. The room grew cold.

Harry shifted in his chair, knotting together his big, heavy hands on the table. Kate reached for him, half-expecting him to flinch away at her touch--God knew, he sometimes startled when the dishes clattered wrong or dove for cover when a Guy Fawkes' rocket sang overhead--but he wrapped her hand in his and pressed it tightly. She almost wished he'd press harder, to the threshold of pain and then over it. The unearthly quiet made her feel half a ghost herself.

With one final squeeze, Harry let her go. He turned a sharp-edged smile on Mr Glendower and asked, too loudly, "What d'you want us to do? Start hooting and howling and gnashing our teeth? Strip down to our skivvies and dance in the moonlight?"

"Remember the dead," said Mr Glendower, with a pointed look at the chair. "Whether or not you believe it, this is a sacred ritual, and I won't have you disrespect it. If it helps, you may certainly gnash your teeth, but please, do keep your clothes on."

Harry looked as though he had a rejoinder ready, but then Archie's voice cut through the air like a saber. "It was near this time of night. Not quite half past. That light, pissing rain--beg pardon."

Something changed in Harry's eyes. They went flat, distant. "Mud nigh over our boots. They had us throwing everything we had over the top. Skinflints didn't want to haul it back."

"Aye, and the Germans were doing the same," said Archie, low. "It was November the tenth. He'd been telling us just that morning, we only had to hang on another day, and then it would be a straight shot home."

"He'd got up to have a smoke," Harry put in. "Never had a chance to strike the match, and then--" His hand described a long, steep arc, then fell to the table with a crash like distant thunder. "Wouldn't have felt a thing."

"Poor lad." Archie looked down at his own hands, at his bitten nails and his knuckles too big for his wedding ring to fit back over. Fresh grief welled up in Kate's throat, hard and smooth as a river stone. She swallowed against tears.

"He was writing a poem," she said. Her voice sounded very far away, thick and muffled and strained. _I mustn't cry,_ she thought. _He'd never let me hear the end of it if I cried._ "He wrote that he was fighting with the scansion harder than ever he'd fought against the Germans. He wanted it to be perfect. But that's how we all go, isn't it? With some damn thing half-finished, in no state to show anyone. God, I love that bad, stupid poem."

Catrin folded the cards together, then passed them to her father. When she spoke, her voice came as though from a long way away. "He signed his last letter to me, 'Rwy'n dy garu di.'" Kate tried not to hear _ruin_ in it. "I would have taught him so many words, if only he'd come back."

Mr Glendower cut the deck, then fanned it out in his hands. "I feel him in the room with us," he said. "Which of you will ask a question of the dead?"

Everyone glanced between Kate and Catrin, but Catrin shook her head. _Not me,_ thought Kate in a sudden panic; _I'll ask the wrong thing; I'll make a muddle of it all--_ "You were his sister," Catrin said. "You know him better than any of us. Blood calls to blood. If he'll come to speak to any of us, he'll come to speak to you."

 _Shit._ "I've never done this before," said Kate. "How should I ask?"

"Feel him here with us," said Catrin. "Look into the candles and try to hold his face in your mind. Do you remember it? His sweet, dear face, that never could grow a beard--"

"And his great jug ears." Kate smiled. "My father's ears. And his earnest way of speaking. His beastly scansion." She looked up at the flickering candles and tried to make herself see anything but flame. She could remember pieces of Edmund's face, all floating on the bright air like scraps of paper on the surface of deep water. His soft jaw. His jug ears. The gleam of his eyes, star-faint but steady. But she couldn't make the pieces come together, and soon they bled into her father's face, or Harry's, or Mr Glendower's. Flame bled through the joining-places until nothing but light remained.

 _What can hold us together, now that you're gone?_ she asked the aching brightness before her. _What did you mean us to do, when you returned?_

"Do you know your question?" Mr Glendower asked. Kate nodded. "Then draw four cards. Let him guide you. He'll help you choose."

Harry opened his mouth, but Archie drove a subtle elbow into his ribs, and he subsided.

 _Let him guide you._ Kate let her fingertips hover over the cards, trying to let herself feel her brother's presence. Trying to feel anything but a deep, welling grief. _Mr Glendower says he's in the room with us ... but Mr Glendower probably believes it. That doesn't make it true._

Nothing reached out to guide her hand, and so Kate chose four cards at random and hoped that it was what Edmund would have done.

Mr Glendower laid out the cards in a cross, then turned them over one by one. "This card signifies the matter of your question," he said. He turned over the Tower, lightning-struck and sundering, the crown falling in a rain of fire. _Disaster. The world disordered; destruction from the heavens._

Mr Glendower drew in a sharp breath. "To see one of the Major Arcana ... this tells me that you've asked a question of great significance. The rise of nations; the fall of kings."

"The king could stand to be taken down a peg or six," muttered Harry.

Kate looked again at the Tower, its windows spouting flame. "I only asked what he thought we should do--what he wanted us to do, when he came back."

"Then perhaps he had some grand design in mind." Mr Glendower turned over the next card, saying, "This signifies a path best avoided." The King of Pentacles lay reversed beneath his hand, sceptered and adorned with a robe of lush grapevines. "A luxurious, improvident ruler," mused Mr Glendower. "Do you find this surprising? Was your brother a radical of some kind?"

"Aye, he was a radical, sure enough," said Archie. "A fair number of those in the trenches came to be some sort of radical, after years of dodging shells with our friends all dead around us."

On the day he'd left, Edmund had kissed Kate's cheek and told her that he was proud to serve King and Country. He had kept a little portrait of Richard II from a magazine in his room when he'd been a boy, and she'd even caught him saluting it a handful of times. _But what did I know about my brother, there at the end? What could he tell Harry and Archie that he couldn't have told me? I wasn't there; I couldn't have known._ "I suppose he couldn't have written anything down, could he," said Kate slowly. "They'd have read his mail. He couldn't have put it in a letter."

With a thoughtful nod, Mr Glendower turned over the next card. "This signifies the path he wishes you to take." His hand revealed the Ace of Swords, blade piercing crown through a hail of flame.

She remembered Edmund's half-finished poem, lying amid the packet of letters, and her hands seemed to move as though without her volition.

 _Of course Edmund wouldn't choose cards to speak to me_ , she thought as her hands took the poem from its envelope and unfolded it. _Of course he would speak for himself, if he had to speak at all._

> "The rain wore on, and soaked through all we wore.  
>  We wept like dreamers waking from a spell.  
>  A shaft of light pierced through the fog of war;  
>  Knee-deep in mud, I gazed as though from Hell  
>  Upon the peace that our long war had bought:  
>  The gas, the rot, and the almighty shell."

Grief hardened into rage in her throat. She remembered Edmund boarding the train with his eyes bright as stars, this beardless boy who had trembled and saluted the king only a few short years ago; she remembered his sweet, earnest voice that Catrin would never hear speaking Welsh, and suddenly a great bonfire of anger welled up from her stomach. _They took him away from us, my sweet brother with his big ears and his smile that filled the whole room, and for what? For a kingdom of ruin and mustard gas, a few yards of earth peppered with shells. For a generation of men who flinch when a rocket grows off._ She blinked back tears, but they fell anyway, pattering on the table. "Turn over the last card," she said.

Mr Glendower turned over the last card, and Death's face lay beneath it. "Death means change," he said. "The sort of change that reshapes the world."

Kate looked from her husband to her father in law, who leaned in close as though arrested by the spectacle of the cards. She looked from Archie to Mr Glendower, and last of all she looked to Catrin. Catrin, who had asked her to speak to the dead.

She didn't know whether Edmund had spoken through her. She didn't know if this towering rage was something he'd given her, or something she'd found on her own. It didn't matter, in the end. _Take up our quarrel with the foe_ , someone had written not long ago--and that man, too, was now among the dead.

Kate heard to the rain, now driving in earnest against the windows and the roofing tiles. Downstairs, the mantel clock chimed nine-thirty.

Something had to change. She felt the enormity of the charge like a deep chasm before her, and it filled her with anger and dread in equal measure.

When they closed up the windows and went downstairs again, Catrin did not pick up her guitar, and Archie and Harry did not talk about rugby. Instead, when Mr Percy and Mr Glendower spoke of what the king owed his people, Kate sat listening with her tumbler of brandy and began drafting arguments of her own.

**Author's Note:**

> Readers familiar with the poets of the Great War will recognize much of Wilfred Owen's story in Mortimer's--in particular, his poetry and his untimely end.


End file.
